He had not seen an actual soldier all day, or if he had, he had been part of a formation, something subsumed into a machine. But this private was alone, he had a scar slicing his eyebrow, he somehow had fought his way to be near the stage, and now was gazing directly into Chaplin’s eyes. He might have been eighteen. There was no color to his face. He wore his overseas cap and olive-drab uniform, and his fingertips clutched at the edge of the stage as if he might otherwise be pulled away. Unlike most of the crowd, he was not laughing. And yet he was not critical. The gaze did not tell Chaplin that he didn’t matter, or that only one of them was real. The emotion in the young man’s eyes was pure fear.

Chaplin thought, with a falling-away of his own frayed nerves, I forgot.

He felt a tap on his heel. It was Pickford. He looked again for the soldier. Gone. Pickford scrambled onstage.

“Finish up,” she said. “I have an idea.”

The idea was not hers. It was McAdoo’s. He had suggested it offhandedly, perhaps because it seemed innocuous to him.

The audience roared as she took the platform alone. She looked up, past the sloshing moat of water, at the Liberty Tower. “People of San Francisco, the Liberty Loan clock stands at two minutes to noon. We need to make a final push, one last surge, to go Over the Top. I have but one thing left to offer.”

She folded her hands before herself, looking every bit the model of supplication.

“A kiss.”

Chaplin was in the backstage area, brooding over what he had seen on that soldier’s face. Then he heard. What sort of kiss could Mary Pickford provide? It would be something between kissing your sister and kissing your sister’s frying pan. He wanted her to look into that boy soldier’s gaze and tell him that her kiss would save him.

There was a strange, tidal motion forward as hand after hand shot up, spring-loaded. A hundred men called out their opening bids—one thousand, five thousand, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, eighteen—and there was confusion as Pickford listened, putting a hand to her ear and leaning over precariously. Twenty-two? There was a bid for twenty-five.

At twenty-eight thousand, it stalled. “Going once,” she said, cautiously.

They would not go Over the Top. Twenty-eight thousand wasn’t enough; it was less than the curl had gone for. People did not want to kiss Mary Pickford as much as she had thought. “I will kiss the first girl who buys a thousand-dollar bond,” Chaplin thought. “I will bend over the nearest sofa the first girl who buys a ten-thousand-dollar bond. And, just for the hell of it, I’ll roger the rear of the first woman who buys a million dollars’ worth.” All the things he could have said.